Aaj Pehli Taareekh Hai
While driving to office on the 1st day of July, my attention was caught by a beautiful radio jingle, which advocated people to have some sweets because it was the first day of the month. Immediately my mind went back in time, 30 years ago when I was a small boy. Those were the days of simple living and modest ambitions. My dad worked in a factory and we stayed in the factory quarters that made up the colony. The colony had 2 or 3 nationalised banks where the employees had their savings account. These banks were so different from the private/multinational banks that we are used to seeing today. These days, very few people visit banks in the cities/bigger towns to draw out money. The ATM machine has made life so much easier for everyone. You don’t need to depend on the bank’s convenience to take out money that is rightfully yours. Thanks to ATM machines one can withdraw money at one’s own convenience and depending on one’s own needs. Then there are also credit and debit cards for those emergencies when you suddenly need to buy something and do not have an ATM machine nearby.
Compare this to the life that we had witnessed when we were young. Going to a bank meant preparation in advance and a sacrifice of one whole half of one’s working day. I remember my father writing out the cheque for the amount that he would have liked to withdraw, the night before he had to go to the bank to withdraw his salary. In the cheque’s counterfoil, he would then do a calculation to keep track of how much money should be there in his account.
Pay day next morning would mean going to the bank at the earliest so that there would be less of a queue and disbursements would be quicker. Anyone visiting any of the banks in the industrial colony would come across rows and rows of cycles and motorcycles/scooters parked outside the banks. People would start to come in from the very moment the bank opened its counters. Although I never checked this out but after all these years, I am pretty sure that the bank employees too knew the importance of pay day and they would make their own preparations well in advance to take care of the rush on pay day.
Then would come the best part of pay day. When there’s money in the pocket, am sure every person feels like indulging in a bit of extra expenditure. This is the universal truth that has prevailed for centuries and my father was certainly no different. On the way back home from the bank, he would stop by at the market and buy a box of sweets for the family. Thirty years back, the box of sweet must have cost around Rs 10 but it definitely fell in the category of extravagance, when you consider that during those days, one rarely went to restaurants or ate anything other than home cooked food. However, what was great about this whole episode was the fact that this made the day, the first day of every month, very special and worth remembering. For a child like me, it was sheer joy of having a sweet to eat but for my parents, it must have meant a lot more. Indulging in the sweet was a symbolism perhaps that they had money to indulge in things other than the day to day needs of the family. It was a symbolism perhaps of the pride they felt in becoming rich-even if it was meant for a single day!
Compare this to the life that we had witnessed when we were young. Going to a bank meant preparation in advance and a sacrifice of one whole half of one’s working day. I remember my father writing out the cheque for the amount that he would have liked to withdraw, the night before he had to go to the bank to withdraw his salary. In the cheque’s counterfoil, he would then do a calculation to keep track of how much money should be there in his account.
Pay day next morning would mean going to the bank at the earliest so that there would be less of a queue and disbursements would be quicker. Anyone visiting any of the banks in the industrial colony would come across rows and rows of cycles and motorcycles/scooters parked outside the banks. People would start to come in from the very moment the bank opened its counters. Although I never checked this out but after all these years, I am pretty sure that the bank employees too knew the importance of pay day and they would make their own preparations well in advance to take care of the rush on pay day.
Then would come the best part of pay day. When there’s money in the pocket, am sure every person feels like indulging in a bit of extra expenditure. This is the universal truth that has prevailed for centuries and my father was certainly no different. On the way back home from the bank, he would stop by at the market and buy a box of sweets for the family. Thirty years back, the box of sweet must have cost around Rs 10 but it definitely fell in the category of extravagance, when you consider that during those days, one rarely went to restaurants or ate anything other than home cooked food. However, what was great about this whole episode was the fact that this made the day, the first day of every month, very special and worth remembering. For a child like me, it was sheer joy of having a sweet to eat but for my parents, it must have meant a lot more. Indulging in the sweet was a symbolism perhaps that they had money to indulge in things other than the day to day needs of the family. It was a symbolism perhaps of the pride they felt in becoming rich-even if it was meant for a single day!
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